Jim Denevan’s Outstanding in the Field, which brings the entire dinner table to the farm, wants to make you a little uncomfortable, and give your food a lot more meaning.
TEXT : Natalie Rinn
Last June, on a dock in Tuna Harbor, San Diego, a local fisherman stood and addressed a single, long dinner table, with place settings for more than 200 guests. On their plates were the fruits of his labour, from the waters in front of them: poached spot prawn, rockfish ceviche, and cured halibut balanced with arugula from a local farm. The diners looked out over the wharf, where the fisherman worked, down the elegantly set table that ran the length of the dock and out to the sea beyond.
“In his late sixties, this gentleman got up and spoke about his entire life working on the sea,” said Jim Denevan, whose company Outstanding in the Field had organized the waterside meal that evening. “This is the guy who caught the fish, and there it is on the table. And when he tells his story,” Denevan continued, “I’m blown away by the beauty of people’s lived experience of providing food for people.”
Today, most of us do not come from large families, live on farms, or eat, in our regular domestic lives, dishes whose components are harvested by the same people with whom we share our meals. And yet, food-based events like this dockside meal in San Diego—slow, at the source—feel familiar to us; they feel essential. And this is partly true due to the work and vision of Jim Denevan.
More than 30 years ago, while Denevan was touring France and Italy working as a model, he noticed how much more integrated food was into daily and local culture than what he was used to in America, where industrialized agriculture and marketing had all but erased the human connections to what eventually ended up on dinner plates. At home, groceries were cheap, available in bulk, microwaveable, disposable—the opposite of slow, at every stage. When he returned to California, he knew he wanted to be a part of changing the increasingly distant relationship Americans had with their food. “It was really strong in my head,” said Denevan. “I really wanted to see how the world would be better in terms of food.”
Secret Sea Cove, Santa Cruz, CA
Photo: Neringa Greiciute
To start, Denevan taught himself to cook, and progressed to the position of chef at the well-known Northern California restaurant Gabriella Café. Eventually, though, he began to see the inherent limitations of cooking the same dishes on repeat for expectant customers. As an artist who also drew temporary, giant, geometric designs on beaches, kitchen work didn’t fulfill his full creative capacity, nor his penchant for spontaneity. So in 1999, at age 37, Jim came up with the initial concept for Outstanding in the Field: why bring the farm to the table when you can bring the entire table to the field where the food was grown, and then share it and the stories behind it with a large dinner party?
The geography that inspired Denevan’s idea -- and the location of one of the very first Outstanding meals -- was his brother Bill Denevan’s organic fruit farm, located near a redwood forest with heirloom apple trees overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In year one, Denevan’s team hosted three meals on California farms. Since then, his company has grown considerably. Following the same guiding principles, Jim and his team have produced more than 1,000 events, in all 50 states, and in 15 countries. His long, recognizable dinner table has been set at the foot of Mount Fuji, among agave plants at a mescal distillery in Oaxaca, and on the cliffs of Big Sur. This year alone, more than 90 Outstanding events are planned, and will expand to celebrate the origins of every single object on the table, from the goblets diners drink out of to the ceramic dishware the meals are served in.
This is impressive, but even more so when you consider that Denevan started Outstanding in pre-internet America. Back then, the majority of his time was spent convincing newspaper journalists to write about his events and trying to explain to people what it was he and his team were trying to do. At the time, people didn’t see the value of sitting together at communal tables and sharing a family-style platter with people they didn’t know. “People were like, ‘I don’t want to break bread with a stranger and pass a platter around to a little group around a farm.’” said Denevan. Outstanding was not just a novel food experience. It was, as one of Jim’s curator friends would call it, an “intervention.” It didn’t just exist in culture, it confronted it head-on.
When I talked to Denevan on the phone, he was at home in Santa Cruz, getting ready to hit the road for another Outstanding event in Arizona with his 1953 Flxible bus, which he purchased for the company in 2007. “I bought the bus and it had no trailer, it was just the bus itself and five people and 200 chairs,” he told me. “Heading out across the U.S., having no idea how many customers we’d have, I was feeling like I needed a barnstormer, or like a stunt. I was so enthusiastic that I wasn’t totally rational about some of the choices I’d made.” This seemed to be indicative of his general persona: intuitive, with no real concern about where, exactly, he might end up.
Sonoma Valley, CA
Photo: Outstanding in the Field
To outsiders, in the early days of Outstanding, that approach to doing business appeared questionable. Denevan, his team, and the Flxibus took their first trip to Canada in 2005; upon arriving at the border, even the guards questioned his sanity. “‘That sounds like a terrible idea,’” Denevan recounted the border guard saying. “‘Why would you want to put a table on a farm? There are flies and it’s hot and windy.’” He forged ahead, though, because he was Jim; the world just needed a little time to catch up with his vision, he thought. And he was right. Several years later, when he returned to Canada with his bus, the guards had a different reaction. “They were like, ‘Oh, I know what that is, I’ve seen pictures, it looks great, have a great trip!’” Outstanding went from losing money at every event to selling out almost every meal as social media began to play a huge role in his publicity efforts, and local celebrity chefs eventually signed on. Nowadays, each and every event is so well supported, says Denevan, they’re all easily able to live up to the name on the flyer: Outstanding.
But for Denevan, it’s not just about the excellence of the food or the connections forged between guests and farmers and chefs that make any of his events feel outstanding—though all of that is crucial. For him, it’s also about that ephemeral, natural element of a lived experience, how everything can suddenly change in a moment, outside of our control, that makes every event singularly special. At one of his favorite meals, staged at the foot of Mount Fuji in 2015, this was especially true.
Locals said the summit appeared in two- and three-week intervals. But during the event, hosted by Fujisan Winery, with guest chef John McCarthy of the Crimson Sparrow in the Hudson Valley (he’d spent a lot of time studying his cuisine in Japan), clouds were blocking the mountain. Denevan, hoping for the best, positioned the table at an angle that recognized the slope of Fujiyama. “Guests were saying, ‘Is that Mount Fuji? Is that Mount Fuji?’” he recounted. He walked off for a minute, to let his guests settle in. But not 15 seconds later, when he turned around, the clouds had parted. “It seemed impossible, but the entire mountain appeared out of the clouds, and everyone at the table applauded,” said Denevan. “I thought, ‘This is really going well.’”
Jackson Hole, WY
Photo: Neringa Greiciute
More than a shared meal, Outstanding in the Field is a meaningful experience, steeped in the present. “We can think about what we want tomorrow, or regret or appreciate the past, but our time is now, and we appreciate where we are in the season. That’s really what Outstanding is all about,” he explained. “It is constantly refreshed, because seasons are always changing.” Like his earth-forged artworks that disappear with every tide, so do any traces of his meals—each one assembled, and disassembled, on site, in a single day—outside the memories of their participants.
The celebration of the moment is something he learned to embrace in the earlier days of Outstanding, while at a meal on a vegetable farm in Craftsbury, Vermont. He placed his table right in the middle of a field of fiery buckwheat, which, Denevan noted giddily, was exactly the same height as his table. The site was too far away from the barn to take shelter in case it were to rain; sure enough, the skies opened up and poured warm drops on his guests. Everyone was soaked. “It rained the entire event, all the way through,” recalled Denevan. “There was a salad that became soup.” But he noticed something incredible: his guests were still having a good time. Some came up and told him afterward that it was the best event they had ever been to.
Photo : Ilana Freddye
So this year, if you end up near one of the vegetable farms, fruit orchards, olive groves, date gardens, or beaches where yet another Outstanding event will soon be taking place, you might consider stopping by. Reconnecting with nature and food, and the people who produce it, is a powerful ritual—even, and especially, when the moment takes over the plan. “When people are brave and willing to get out of their typical patterns,” says Denevan, “they’re rewarded, they’re fulfilled by it.” He will set the table. All you have to do is put on some field-friendly shoes, and find your way to it.
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Natalie Rinn was born in Minnesota. The former editor-in-chief of Brooklyn Magazine now works as a podcast editor and freelance writer. Drawn to the idea of jogging on dry terrain, she recently left New York for Los Angeles
